Jim Miller on Politics

Pseudo-Random Thoughts

We can see a socio-sexual parallel between the geography of the wilderness and the
topographies of narrative in this genre, which organizes a particular spatial itinerary and social
anatomy.

(Which is about a Canadian silent film maker, if you are wondering.)

Or Yale English professor Paul Kay's:

It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the
concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness -- rather than
the will to power -- of its fall into conceptuality.

(Which I won't even try to decode.)

Or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's:

In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other
and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and
extremely intimate.

(Which is part of their attack on free trade, though how I can't explain.)

Fulford thinks that the humanities professors have been trapped, by fashion and tenure
requirements, into this jargon; those who don't publish this kind of nonsense, perish.
That seems right to me. He advises students exposed to this stuff to fake it
until they can escape. That's practical advice, if not very principled or brave, but
it neglects the cost of this nonsense, paid mostly by taxpayers. An English professor
may cost taxpayers 100 thousand dollars a year or more; they ought to get more in return
than occasionally entertaining nonsense. Parents at private schools like Yale have
more choice in the matter than taxpayers, but if they are not aware of this before their
children enroll, they would have a good moral case to sue the school for fraud.

- 7:26 AM, 16 July 2003

Update: The "Watchmaker" sent me this
link to one of the
funnier examples of this nonsense. Physicist Alan Sokal created a completely
nonsensical article, sent it to one the prominent post-modern journals, which published
it. What struck me most about the affair is that the journal did not seem to be
especially embarrassed afterwards.

Update: Police now think that the light skinned South
African boy living in an all black area was not kidnapped from white parents, but was the
son of the maid who had left him there. Here's the
story.
What made the idea that he had been kidnapped believable was his very light skin, for those
who missed the original story.

Brights and Dims, and the Moral Majority and the Immoral Minority:
British scientist Richard Dawkins recently proposed that atheists like himself call themselves,
modestly, "brights". (For a longer explanation of the idea, see this
op-ed.)
The term has, in my opinion, exactly the same defect that Jerry Falwell's "Moral Majority"
did. Though the term will please those that agree with Dawkins, it will offend those
who do not, or are undecided. People thought Falwell was arrogant when he, in effect,
called people who disagreed with him, "immoral". People will think Dawkins is
equally arrogant when he, in effect, calls those who disagree with him, "dim". Oddly,
both men could have avoided their errors if they paid more attention to their own doctrines.
Christians like Falwell are warned against the sin of pride, and academics like Dawkins often
inveigh against intolerance.

Worth Reading: James Bennett's light-hearted comparison of
the British and American approaches to religion and news. The BBC and the Church of
England have much in common, he thinks. And, as an American, he naturally favors
disestablishment
for the BBC, just as his ancestors favored it for the Church of England. (I would go
even farther and close down the public support for our PBS, as well.)

Saddam Had Spies in the United States, following everything his
opponents here did. The Iraqi National Congress captured tons of documents in
Iraq and is now analyzing them to identify
Saddam's agents in
the United States, who may have done more than just gather information.

How the information was used is not known, but [Chicago businessman Guliana] Younan has
received phone threats, his cars were vandalized, and a previous business of his was broken
into and torched. No arrests were made in those incidents, he said.

Dissidents suspect that informants also helped Iraqi intelligence agents carry out unsolved,
execution-style murders of other opposition leaders in the United States. Still, dissidents
complain that in the past they had trouble getting law enforcement to pursue individuals suspected
of spying for Saddam.

When the First President Bush Decided to Bribe North Korea to
stop developing nuclear weapons, I approved. Although it was not certain that the
policy would succeed, it seemed the best of several bad alternatives. When the Clinton
administration decided to continue the policy (after some outrageous interference by former
President Carter), I was more skeptical since we seemed to be rewarding the violation of
the first agreement. Even then, I was not sure it was not still the best of the bad
alternatives. We were not alone in these decisions. Japan and South Korea,
both closer to the problem than we, in every way, agreed with them, and even provided their
own bribes. (The South Koreans even sent funds illegally to the North Korean leaders,
in advance of peace talks.)

I was wrong, and so were the leaders who made these decisions to bribe North Korea.
Since we began this policy, North Korea has gone through a horrible famine in which, by some
estimates, ten per cent of the population died. They have continued to develop nuclear
weapons and to sell their missiles and technology to other states hostile to us. The
money we and our allies have sent them has gone into weapons production and the pocket of
the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had an
extensive article (not available free on line) describing just how much money he squirreled
away in an organization with the bland name of "Division 39", while his nation starved.

According to interviews with high-level defectors, South Korean businessmen and Asian
intelligence officials, Division 39 has generated a cash hoard as large as $5 billion that is
salted away in places as disparate as Macau, Switzerland and Pyongyang. It produces a
steady flow of money that Mr. Kim uses to buy political support and loyalty.
Intelligence officials have also tied it to Pyongyang's efforts to develop weapons of mass
destruction.

They could have bought a lot of rice with five billion dollars.

After more than a decade of trying to bribe North Korea and failing, you would think that
everyone would understand that it was time to try something different. (The current
Bush policy of mostly ignoring North Korea, which forces the Chinese and South Koreans to
confront the problem now seems about the best of the bad alternatives.) You would be
wrong, as you can see in this extraordinary
editorial
in the Guardian, which calls for still larger bribes. The Guardian even opposes
undermining the North Korean regime because of the difficulties that refugees might
cause South Korea. Those starving currently should just stay where they are and not
make a fuss, I suppose. And the Guardian doesn't even mention what happened to the
previous aid, much of which vanished into Division 39.

In this
post, I mentioned the belief, found on both
sides of the political spectrum, that the other side is tougher and less scrupulous.
Yesterday, Doonesbury illustrated my point in this
strip,
except that he has the conservative agreeing with the liberal's belief that the right is
tougher. For some evidence on which side is actually nastier, see this
article
on Julian Bond's speech to the NAACP convention. Bond, a former Democratic state
legislator, had this to say:

Republicans appeal "to the dark underside of American culture, to that minority of Americans
who reject democracy and equality," NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said yesterday at the civil rights
group's 94th annual convention.

"They preach racial neutrality and practice racial division ... their idea of reparations is
to give war criminal Jefferson Davis a pardon," Mr. Bond said during his welcoming remarks. "Their
idea of equal rights is the American flag and Confederate swastika flying side by side."

So, Republicans are racists, Nazis, and Confederates, who reject both democracy and equality.
At least this time, unlike 2001, he did not indirectly compare the Republicans to the Taliban.
Perhaps I miss it, but Bond does not seem "hung up on fairness" nor does he seem to be
trying to "respect all points of view". Bond complains that President Bush has not
met with the leaders of the NAACP, but, considering the personal insults Bond showers on
the president, that is hardly surprising.

A member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was arrested on Saturday south of Ramallah on
suspicion he had come to Israel to teach Palestinian terrorists how to upgrade their
explosives.

British sources told the Observer newspaper Sunday that the man, John Morgan, was a
member of the mainstream IRA guerrilla group, but four years ago switched allegiances to the
dissident splinter group known as the Real IRA, which refuses to accept the Good Friday
agreement of 1998 concerning cessation of acts of war in Northern Ireland.

Those opposed to the liberation of Iraq often argued that al Qaeda and Saddam would never
cooperate tactically because they disagree so profoundly. But we know that
many terrorist groups, including the IRA, have cooperated with all sorts of other
anti-Western and anti-Israel groups and nations. There is nothing implausible about
Saddam and Osama working together in the near term, even though they plan to do each other
in later.

- 8:13 AM, 14 July 2003

Update: British intelligence may have identified the wrong
man, according to this
editorial.
However, my more general point still stands; the IRA has been cooperating with many other
terrorist organizations, including some in the Middle East.

Routine Anti-Americanism, Example 8: Another article of
faith among leftwing British journalists is that Americans have been persecuting Muslims
since 9/11.
Gary Younge
claims that:

Anti-Arab discrimination is not a new problem in America. But since September 11 it has
greatly intensified. Alienation, racism, miscarriages of justice are just a few of the
things that have already emerged as a result of this process.

Younge can not be bothered to present any evidence for this smear, other than a vague quote
from a representative of an interest group. It is true that
immigration authorities have been searching for Muslims who are here illegally. I would
expect British authorities to search for Irish who are in Britain illegally, after an attack
by the IRA. To do otherwise, in both cases, would be foolish.

One can find an
anti-Muslim incident or two, which is not surprising in a nation with nearly 300 million
people, but there has been no organized campaign against either Arabs or Muslims, and
considerable efforts to prevent one. President Bush, from the beginning, was careful
to say that most Muslims rejected the terrorist attacks. In Seattle, after a drunk
made a haphazard effort to burn a mosque, neighbors, including many from nearby churches,
organized a watch to protect the mosque. One poll after the 9/11 attack actually
showed more sympathy for Muslims than before, partly because of all these official and
unofficial efforts to prevent discrimination against Muslims or Arabs, I would guess.

Nor can he be bothered to notice the evidence against the smear. An Arab-American
general has just been named to a top post in Iraq. Iraqi exiles, who are mostly Arabs
and mostly Muslims, are strong supporters of Bush's policies toward the Saddam regime.
And it would be easy for any reporter with an open mind to find more evidence against
Younge's article of faith, if, that is, they want to.

(Younge makes a telling error, confusing Arabs and Muslims. Most Arabs in
the United States are Christians, not Muslims. And most Muslims in the United States
are not Arabs.)

Their shrill criticisms of the Iraq operation and more the president's assertions that
Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction presented a clear and present danger to the
security of the United Sates and its people, could bounce back on them.

Rather than cause a majority of Americans to turn on the president when the vote comes up
next year, Democrats may be reminding voters of their party's biggest weakness: They are perceived
as soft on national defense and therefore can not be trusted to manage the national security.

The Democrats are trapped, as they were in 1972, between the desires of their activists and
the views of the more moderate independent voters. Nixon won a landslide victory in
1972. It wasn't because of his great personal appeal, as those old enough to remember
the man can tell you.

Benedetto is a thoughtful moderate; curiously, the far left editor of the Seattle Weekly,
Knute Berger, comes to a similar conclusion about the search for Saddam's chemical and
biological weapons in this
column.

LIBERALS ARE FOOLS to hang their hopes on Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction.
While clearly the warmongering Bush administration lied about WMDs in the run-up to the war,
exaggerating Iraqi capabilities, it is extremely unwise to pin your hopes on a negative.
The Iraqis certainly had such weapons (and used them) and may have stashed the remnants somewhere:
a backyard, a bunker, a neighboring country, or all of the above. Odds are, eventually, we'll find
at least something that can fall under the ridiculously general WMD label, and possibly much
more. For most Americans, the WMD question is just nit-picking: We kicked Saddam's ass
(wherever it may be), so there.

Since this is Knute Berger, he continues to predict a "quagmire", even though he admits,
indirectly, that he was completely wrong in his predictions before the war. And,
although he denies it, he is, as one can see from his columns, one of the journalists who
hopes for a "quagmire". (By the way, isn't it time to find a new metaphor to replace
"quagmire"?) For those interested in the facts on the ground, unlike Berger, see this
column
by Ralph Peters on our progress in the war, which ends with this summary:

Once again, G.I. Joe went off to foreign shores and made the world a better, safer place.
It's time to recognize the dimensions of our accomplishment and stop declaring failure in
the face of triumph.

Especially if you want to win public office outside of Seattle, Berkeley, and similar
places.

First Blogoversary: About a year ago I put up my first posts on
this site. I say about because the records I have just show the the week I started, not
the day. (If you notice small details, you may wonder why there are a few posts
with earlier dates. I started out building the site off line as I taught myself some
of the basics, but didn't put them up until later, though I did post a dummy file in
June of last year just to check on procedures.) In this last year, I've had a great deal
of fun, built up a respectable level of traffic, and received some interesting feedback
from all over the world. Here are some of the best posts and articles from this last
year, beginning with two that I had circulated earlier to friends and family by email:

A comparison of George Bush and Al Gore, written during
the 2000 campaign. The gap in their achievements was not, I concluded, in the direction most
would think.

A Q&A Analysis of the 2000 election, with much
information on possible fraud in registration, voting, counting, and recounting.

My second post, which noted a word missing from descriptions of
Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority—fascism.

My first big hit,
"What Would Mohamed Do?", a politically incorrect sketch
of the prophet's life. (I doubt that the phrase in the title is original, but I didn't found
an earlier example when I searched the net.)

An explanation of how New York Times columnist Paul Krugman committed a common
methodological error, the "ecological fallacy".
(He's never corrected it, though I am sure others must have brought it to his attention.

My prediction that President Bush would
advance the cause of free trade, in spite of some early steps back. Although the jury
is still out, I think the evidence so far mostly supports my argument.

My prediction that casualties in a war with Iraq might be even fewer than in
the first Gulf War. I contradicted New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and a real
military expert, Michael O'Hanlon.

A unified theory of Maureen Dowd, explaining all
the "rules" others have used to describe her columns.

America as Gulliver among the
Lilliputians. Just weeks after I posted this analogy, the Mexican foreign minister
made the identical comparison, and confessed the purpose of all those treaties Bush is
accused of ignoring. They are threads to tie us down.

My final election prediction. The
Republicans, I said, would increase their margin in the House by five seats and take control
of the Senate.

An explanation of hormesis, that odd
phenomena, in which small amounts of toxins or radiation can actually improve your
health.

A summary of Al Sharpton's
disgraceful career of anti-Semitism, which does not, somehow, disqualify him from running
for president—as a Democrat, anyway.

My analysis of Iraqi opinion about a
war to remove Saddam. Using a variety of evidence, I concluded that between 50 and
90 per cent of Iraqis wanted Saddam removed, even at the cost of a war. Events since
suggest that the analysis was correct; most Iraqis accept our presence, but a minority does
not.

My review of some recent unilateral
removals of dictators from power in Uganda, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, and Haiti.
All were truly unilateral. None had the advance approval of the United Nations.
Nearly everyone now approves of these unilateral actions.

My skeptical assessment of the original
claims about the looting of the Iraqi museums. Months afterward, events have shown
that I was right and the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Times of London, the
Washington Post, and many others were wrong.

The strange long term changes in
crime in the United States and other
nations of the Western world. Crime fell for three centuries, but then rose again in
the 20th.

My take on the missing
chemical and biological weapons. Their
volumes are so small that they would be easy to hide or destroy, which Saddam had plausible
motivations to do.

Some perspective on Iraq from the World War II campaign to capture the small island of
Peleliu, which cost us almost ten times as
many casualties as the entire Iraq campaign, to date.

Brutal Liberian Dictator Charles Taylor has some strange supporters
in the United States, like
Jesse Jackson.
Kenneth Timmerman, a respected investigative reporter, charges Jackson with helping create
the problem:

As President Clinton's special envoy for Democracy and Human rights in Africa, starting in
October 1997, Jackson became the administration's point man for Africa.

It was Jackson who legitimized both Liberian strongman Charles Taylor and his protégé, the
machete-wielding militia leader in neighboring Sierra Leone, Cpl. Foday Sankoh. The
two hacked to death several hundred thousand citizens of their respective countries.

And he implies that Jackson (and others) did so for the most mercenary of reasons.

Among the first questions prosecutors should ask Taylor is whom he paid off using Foday
Sankoh's diamonds. U.S. intelligence officers reported these payoffs at the very moment
that Jackson was negotiating a favorable role for Taylor and for Sankoh in Lome, former CIA
officers and other sources have told me over the past two years. As a result of the
payoffs, Taylor continued to enjoy support among the Congressional Black Caucus and with the
Clinton State Department.

But who received the diamonds, how were they brokered onto the international marketplace in
Europe and where the cash proceeds went remains a mystery. Taylor knows many of the
answers. Watch Jesse Jackson try to save him now.

Jackson is not the only American political figure who has ties to Taylor. So does
Pat Robertson.
It is possible that either, or both, of these men were duped. But that's kindest
explanation of their support for Taylor, and not one I consider very likely for either
man.

Howard Dean's Chances: Dean Esmay argued
here that Republicans
should not entirely dismiss the chances of Howard Dean defeating President Bush in 2004.
I agree, and can give a rough, back of the envelope, estimate for Dean's chances. &nbsp
Ron Faucheux, editor of Campaigns and Elections, regularly estimates odds in national
races, and has a good track record for predictions. (He claims more than 98 per cent
correct. That number refers to his final predictions, naturally, not the earlier
ones he makes throughout the campaign.) His latest, for the presidential race are
here. Faucheux currently estimates Bush's
chances of winning re-election at 58.3 per cent, so the Democrats, together, have a 41.7 per
cent chance of defeating him. Faucheux estimates Dean's chances of winning the
Democratic nomination at 9.1 per cent. If we naively do the multiplication, then we
would say that Dean has a 3.379 per cent chance of becoming president, not great, but not
that much worse than the other Democratic candidates. That is naive, as Faucheux
would probably tell us, since most observers think that Dean would be weaker against Bush
than some other Democrats. Most likely, Dean's chances of being president are at
most 2 per cent, currently.

However, as Esmay also argues, Howard Dean has a greater chance of influencing the
Democratic party if he wins the nomination, just as Goldwater and McGovern did earlier in
both parties. I would go even farther. Even if Dean loses the nomination, he
has already shifted the party a bit to the left, by making respectable, or at least
semi-respectable, arguments associated with its nutty fringe. Other candidates have
seen his appeal to Democratic activists, and have already adjusted what they are saying on
the war with Saddam. The more success he has in the primaries, the more effect he
will have on the party.

Dick Morris, for one, thinks that the influence of independents, who can vote in many of the
early primaries, will push the party toward the center. He may be right, but the
combination of multiple candidates and low turnouts in the primaries can produce very strange
results. I would argue, for instance, that several of his Democratic opponents in
1988 could have defeated Michael Dukakis if the campaign had been a series of one-on-one
contests.

A partisan prefers that the other parties' candidate be weak and foolish; a patriot wants all
parties with a chance to win to present decent candidates with sound ideas. It would
be best for the nation if Dean were to be eliminated quickly in the race for the
nomination.

Some Minorities Don't Deserve Representation, thinks journalism
professor Floyd McKay. At least that's what I conclude from this
column
on the likely senate race between Congressman George Nethercutt and incumbent senator
Patty Murray. The rural minority in Washington state, concentrated in the eastern
half of the state, has not elected a senator for many years. This is just fine with
Professor McKay, though the rural areas here are poorer than the urban areas, and
policies imposed by urban politicians are one of the causes of that relative poverty.

What about the substance of his argument, that Nethercutt has no chance against
Murray? Although odds favor Murray, as they do most incumbents, she is hardly
unbeatable. It is simply false to argue that:

Her only Achilles' heel is comments made in the wake of 9/11 suggesting to a school audience
that Osama bin Laden had support among Arabs because he delivered social services.
Although the comments were true, and appropriate in the setting, Nethercutt quickly branded
her soft on terrorism.

Murray has other weaknesses. To begin with, she's not very bright, as I discussed at
length here. That's not just my opinion;
she is a consistent winner of the "not a rocket scientist" category in the Washingtonian
magazine's annual polls. Second, she's a bit out of step with the times; her pork
barrel policies were more popular in past years than they are now. The (un)Sound
Transit light rail project, which she has backed, is now unpopular even in this area and
would lose by a big margin in the state. Third, she has managed to look both
vacillating and hypocritical on Iraq. She opposed authorizing President Bush to use
force (contrary to what professor McKay says), but then rushed to greet the troops when
some of them returned home.

(Regular readers, unlike Professor McKay, will know that her comments about bin Laden were
not true. They were false in a minor, indisputable way; bin Laden did not build any
day care centers, which have no place in his radical form of Islam. More importantly,
no real expert on terrorism would claim that "social services" are what attract people to
al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Someone who believes that, against all
the evidence, is not fit to be a senator, or a journalism professor, for that matter.)

Years ago, I jokingly suggested that news organizations could improve by refusing to hire
anyone with a journalism degree. Obviously, there are exceptions; I believe that
Joanne Jacobs has a degree in journalism, and I'd hire her in a second if I were running a
newspaper. Still, if Professor McKay is typical, with his bias and frequent,
uncorrected errors, I think news organizations would improve if they considered a journalism
degree a minus, rather than a plus, in their applicants.

- 8:24 AM, 10 July 2003

Update: Joanne Jacobs tells me that she actually has a
degree in English, which provides one more bit of evidence for my theory that news
organizations should be slow to hire people with journalism degrees.

"I would like to see some helicopters flying over these sites, and some bullets fired at the
looters," Elizabeth Stone, head of archaeology at Stony Brook University in New York, said in
London yesterday. "I think you have got to kill some people to stop this."

Professor Stone, who directed major excavations in Iraq in the 1980s, is a speaker at an
international conference on the archaeology of the region, being held this week at the British
Museum.

Now, I can understand why archaeologists would want the sites protected, but should it be
tops on our priorities, as opposed to, for example, protecting our own troops or getting
clean water to Iraqi children? Imagine the reaction if President Bush, rather than
Professor Stone, had said this, or if an oil executive urged shooting looters of the
Iraqi petroleum facilities on sight.

Anne Applebaum says that Hillary Clinton is praising the
wrong Thatcher,
Margaret, rather than Denis, whom she should have emulated. That argument will cause
gnashing of teeth in Senator Clinton's offices, since Applebaum is saying that Hillary
completely botched the job of First Lady. (At that, Applebaum is kinder than I am in
assessing Clinton's claim to admire Margaret Thatcher. I am not sure that it is any
more than an attempt to sell her book.)

Bush's Trip to Africa creates a dilemma for the Bush
haters in the press and in the Democratic party. He is doing what they have said they
want him to do, but it may benefit him politically. This
column by Mary
Mitchell of the Chicago Sun-Times shows their struggle over whether to praise him for
his initiatives to help Africans. To her credit, Mitchell does just that in her
lead sentences:

Thank, you President Bush for going to Africa. There, I've said it. Those two little
words sure took a load off my mind.

And her closing:

No, black people don't have to vote for Bush because he went to Africa. But we do
have to give him credit.

Funny, isn't it? You just never know where your blessings will come from.

Knowing the dilemma this trip would cause for the Bush haters at the networks, I quickly
channel surfed through the ABC, CBS, and NBC news programs last night to see if any made
Bush's trip the lead story. As far as I could tell, none did. ABC preferred
to lead with the story that the Bush administration had finally admitted that it had been
fooled by a forged document on uranium sales to Saddam, and I think the other networks did
the same. This is literally not news since the
fact of the document's forgery has been known for months. (Nor would it necessarily be
very important, even if it were news. The British and American governments have both
said that they have multiple sources for their claim that Saddam was trying to buy uranium in
Africa. That one piece of evidence was wrong does not disprove the general case.)

In choosing not to give Bush favorable coverage, the networks are like Mitchell's boyfriend,
who, she tells us, is going to give her "heck" if he sees this column. They would rather
that millions of Africans suffer than see Bush get credit.

One last point. Much of the anger felt by blacks toward Bush was created,
deliberately, by the Democratic party and its allies, like the NAACP, in the 2000 election,
because they were worried about his appeal to blacks. The arguments they used were
disgusting, even by the low standards of political campaigns.

Wondering About Climate Change? James Schlesinger has a good
summary
of the current scientific uncertainty on the subject.

We are in command of certain essential facts. First, since the start of the 20th
century, the mean temperature at the earth's surface has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit.
Second, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing for more than 150 years.
Third, CO2 is a greenhouse gas -- and increases in it, other things being equal, are likely to
lead to further warming. Beyond these few facts, science remains unable either to attribute
past climate changes to changes in CO2 or to forecast with any degree of precision how climate
will change in the future.

Schlesinger notes that variations in the sun's output could also explain temperature changes
in the 20th century. Besides that, there are some stranger possibilities, including
a recent theory
that changes in cosmic rays, caused by interstellar dust, cause climate change on earth.
Schlesinger ends with a call for modesty about our current knowledge:

There is an idea among the public that "the science is settled." Aside from the limited
facts I cited earlier, that remains far from the truth. Today we have far better instruments,
better measurements and better time series than we have ever had. Still, we are in danger of
prematurely embracing certitudes and losing open-mindedness. We need to be more modest.

Agreed.

(Schlesinger has had quite a career. He served three presidents, Nixon, Ford, and
Carter, in positions that included CIA Director, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of
Energy.)

Progress in Afghanistan: This USA Today
article
begins with the conventional wisdom:

The simplistic way to look at what's been happening here since the Taliban regime was
vanquished a little more than 19 months ago is to focus on the broken promises, the
lack of progress and regular warnings that at any moment Afghanistan could again be
torn apart.

But that's not the view of most Afghans. Many are happy that they can now do
something as simple as go on a picnic, which was forbidden by the Taliban.

It takes an Afghan, someone who knows that this country was one of the world's poorest
and least-developed even before it was devastated by two decades of fighting, to see a
picnic as a sign of something larger. It also takes an Afghan to note that it's
a stretch to try to compare the situation and lessons learned here with what the United
States and its coalition partners now face in Iraq, where some object to the presence of
foreign troops and the temporary control of their country by U.S. bureaucrats.

There are great problems, but also signs of progress, both large and small:

Another positive sign: There were fears before the U.S.-led war that Afghanistan might
explode as its religious and ethnic groups made power grabs after the Taliban was removed.
But there have been no serious uprisings. And work continues on a new constitution and
toward national elections in June.
. . .
In Istalif, the picnickers are not the only people who say Afghanistan is chipping away at
its challenges. Muhammad Naseem Qadeer Zada, 19, lived with his family in Pakistan for
nearly 10 years. Now he's back, and he runs a small shop where he sells blue-and-green
pottery -- a specialty of his village -- that he, his brothers and father make.

Wonder which news organizations might be pushing that "simplistic" way of looking at
things?

Publish, and Americans May Perish: Sean Gorman's adviser
thought his thesis "tedious and unimportant", but anti-terrorism officials find it all too
fascinating to one set of readers,
terrorists.
These compilations of information make it all too easy for foreign (and domestic) terrorists to
locate their targets, yet it is not easy to see just how to regulate them.

Republican, Democrat, Who Cares? Not the Guardian's
American correspondent, Gary Younge, who converts New Jersey's governor, Jim McGreevey, from
a Democrat to a Republican, in this
column.
(I don't find the error surprising. Judging by his earlier pieces, Younge's knowledge of
American political figures is limited to people of color who really, really like Cuban
dictator Fidel Castro.)

Younge is also rather reticent in describing just how vile Baraka's "poetry" is.
Look through this
column
by Ward Connerly and you'll see some of the gems that Younge doesn't mention, like this one: